


frater adempte mihi

by nductor



Category: The Hobbit (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, M/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-18
Updated: 2013-01-18
Packaged: 2017-11-25 21:51:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/643339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nductor/pseuds/nductor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grief pours for him a libation of tears, so generous that he thinks he will become a figure of legend: the dwarf who wept until he became a river through the plain, his tributaries twining through the land in his endless quest to find his brother once more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	frater adempte mihi

**Author's Note:**

> apologies for handwaving geography and politics for my own ends / generally telling canon to go eat a dick.
> 
> title is from catullus 101, which this is shamelessly based on.

The campaign is not meant to be so serious an affair.

He is certain Thorin would scoff at such an assertion (it is a _campaign_ ; by definition it is a _serious affair_ ), but Fíli knows they are of the same mind about this. He is loathe to see his brother go because his king has bade him stay on matters of state, and because they have scarcely ever been parted; it is not because he genuinely fears for his brother's well-being. There will be fighting, of course, but they have survived the wrath of a fire-drake and the great clash that men are now calling the Battle of Five Armies. A squabble with the disorganized Easterlings who have been edging into their territories cannot compare.

It is the price of their success, that their borders grow ever farther from them, ever more difficult to defend with surety.

Thorin has begun rebuilding Erebor, pulling his kingdom up from beneath the dust in what often appears to be a single-handed effort. It is a long haul, to be certain, but what Fíli has seen these past few years is enough to make him hopeful. With Thorin as king, and many of their company among his council, they will bring Erebor to her feet once more; he knows they will.

But others are not so fortunate. Dáin is dead, felled in the Battle, and his throne in the Iron Hills is now occupied by his young son, Thorin III. The boy-king has deferred wisely to Erebor, but he has grown bold under her banner (or perhaps in his desperation to preserve the might of his father's kingdom), extending his reach into Rhûn. Fíli can see the practicality of this; the boy-king commands a great army, and many of his subjects have left the Iron Hills to live in Erebor--if he can stay them with the promise of land and foreign riches, so be it.

But Fíli can also see the folly of it. The settlements in the flatlands are vulnerable; he hears that the largest of them have great ramparts, but there will ever be a difference between a wall and a mountain. The villages that crop up around these fortified cities are even more precarious, all but open invitations to raiders.

"He cannot order them to stop building houses," Thorin reprimands, and Fíli concedes the point.

It is not so long before the boy-king is sending his armies away from the mountain to guard his cities, and sometimes deeper still into the Eastlands to quash the most threatening settlements nearby. When he begins to request aid from Erebor, it is only right that Thorin send one of his heirs in a show of friendship--and the captain of his guard, to ensure that the matter is dealt with swiftly and competently.

This is how Kíli and Dwalin come to ride out at the head of their modest army, their course set for the vassal kingdom of the Iron Hills.

Dwalin is a fine warrior, one from whom Kíli will learn many things yet, and Fíli is content that his brother is in good hands. During the day, he watches Balin receive ambassadors and pores endlessly over his histories (for despite all that Thorin has taught him, he is not equipped for all of his functions as crown prince.) At night, he reads and re-reads the letters from his brother, penning responses to each new one that arrives.

Kíli writes as often as can be expected, opens all his missives with _my dearest brother_ and ends each one with _yours in all things_. He writes, good-humored, that he tires of riding, of setting and breaking camp, of patrolling their borders for trouble. He writes of the occasional bandits who cross his party, on their way to raid some farm or village, writes of how he has had them cut down without mercy.

 _Would that there were no necessary evils_ , he writes, more than once.

Thorin receives letters from Dwalin, and from these he tells Fíli everything that his brother neglects to mention. Dwalin reports that Kíli is the sort of prince who dines with his soldiers instead of in his tent, that he muddies his boots erecting palisades beside them, and that they love him for it. That at first he needed Dwalin's strong arm to remind the others of his rank, but that now they defer to him gladly. Fíli is not surprised by these things, but he beams with pride all the same.

They send resources from Erebor regularly, and Fíli promises more than once to stow away in one of the caravans when he can beg a few weeks off of his work. But as he toils away, he finds that fall is upon him. Soon, they are organizing for a party of workmen to be sent out in the following spring, to construct outposts along their borders--something Kíli has petitioned for and Thorin has granted.

 _I will be back for the winter_ , Kíli writes. _I count the days until I can see you._

Fíli wants to write back, _I count the days until I can kiss your mouth and feel you beneath my hands._ Fíli wants to write, _I will sleep better than I have all year when you are beside me again._ But these words are too incriminating to put on paper, so he only writes, _Erebor feels your absence keenly, my dear brother._ He will save his private words and breathe them against Kíli’s lips when they are together once more. He writes, _come home soon._

But Kíli does not.

When at first the letters cease, Fíli thinks their messenger has been delayed by the weather, for winter has set in quickly and unkindly. But then one of Dwalin's letters arrives alone and dread seeps into his bones like a chill at the sight of it, because he knows this does not bode well.

"My brother," he urges, even as Thorin breaks the seal, falling helplessly to his side. He watches as Thorin reads, trying to glean something from his expression, his gut twisting at the furrow of his uncle's brow.

"He is not well," Thorin says at last, with the tell-tale anticlimax of understatement in his voice, and Fíli feels suddenly weak, his breath coming short.

"What do you mean, not well?" he asks, and he cannot help the hysteria that swells between his ribs, the way his heart pounds in his throat. " _What do you mean?_ "

"He has been gravely wounded in battle," Thorin says, steady even as Fíli lurches forward in protest, as though preventing the words from being spoken will reverse the deed. "Dwalin fears he is not long for this world."

Fíli supplicates himself before his uncle in an instant. "Let me go to him," he demands, with steel in his voice and lead in his heart.

The pity in Thorin's eyes is unbearable. "Fíli, this letter was written days ago," he says, and the implication hangs between them, beyond terrible, beyond what is _permissible_.

"No." Fíli will not have this. He pushes himself to his feet, hands braced on the arms of his uncle's throne. "I will not think my brother dead until I see his body on a bier." He all but shouts the words into Thorin's face, because it is the only way to keep his voice from trembling.

Thorin does not respond. He does not need to.

Fíli rides out at first light and runs his pony ragged. His blood roars in his ears and his hands are numb, and his pulse carves his brother's name beneath his skin, _Kíli, Kíli, Kíli_. He camps alone and sleeps badly, dreams of the din of battle and a river of blood. He wakes uneasily during the night, more than once, and thinks of his brother until sleep takes him again.

He thinks of Kíli's last night in Erebor, the way his brother had laughed and said _you'll be too busy to miss me_. He remembers the way Kíli pinned his wrists and rode him with painstaking care, mouthing along his throat and murmuring against his skin, quiet affections and promises that made his heart swell with fondness. He remembers clutching Kíli greedily close, later, sucking bruises into his shoulders and biting the crest of his hips, and missing him already.

 _It's going to be so dreadfully long_ , he had thought at the time.

It will be unfathomably longer, now.

Fíli continues east, and there is something of the ringing in his ears and the numbness of his skin that helps him stave off the desperation that sets in on his heels. It is a phantom, ever-present, and he begins to think feverishly that he is merely outrunning it--that the wildness in his heart will consume him when he stops.

He breaks upon the army on the fourth day, his pony starting when he nearly crashes into their flank.

"My brother," he demands, and no one will look at him.

Fíli spends the winter locked in the bowels of the mountain, his beard shorn in mourning. He festers like an angry wound, despite Thorin's best efforts, hovers gaunt on the edge of madness, delirious in his longing. He is mute with grief, and he would forget the sound of his own voice if it did not sometimes rise from him unbidden in the unpredictable recklessness of his agony.

He hears that the skirmishes in Rhûn have grown bloodier, that the boy-king's villages are sacked and even his fortress-cities sit abandoned, but Fíli cannot find the solidarity to believe that his uncle's armies belong on the plains. Here is the war that robbed him of his brother; Erebor has given more than enough to its clutches. He thinks, traitorously, that he would send entire armies to their deaths nevertheless, if it would bring Kíli back to him.

He thinks many traitorous thoughts, unbecoming of a dwarf prince, in those months.

He spends much of his time at Kíli's tomb, which lies empty and does nothing to ease the sickness in his heart. He sits before it, in vicious spite of the peace it is supposed to bring him, despising the uselessness of this monument to his brother's glory. (And Fíli wonders bitterly what glory there is for boys who play at being soldiers and die feverish on an infirmary cot, choking on their own blood and bile. He has heard enough to know that Kíli did not die well.)

He has been denied even his brother's body, burned in the custom of fighting men and buried somewhere on the eastern plain with his soldiers. He thinks, foolishly, that perhaps if he could have seen it, he could better believe that Kíli is no longer here. But he knows there would still be the maddening truth that he did not feel in his own flesh the sword that rent his brother's. That he did not feel it in his heart the moment Kíli's spirit fled across the sea.

What kind of brother is he, what kind of lover, that such momentous horrors simply escaped his notice?

He asks himself this question, over and over, in defiance of the way his entire being cringes away from the thought of it. The shameful, twisting ache of it is a nearly welcome counterpoint to the relentless cold. He will not allow himself to hide from his brother's memory; if it hurts, it does so no more than he deserves.

It would be an untruth to say that despair unhooks its claws from him, or that the grip of loneliness has loosened; these things are realities beneath his skin, carved deep into his bones, as much a part of him as the blood in his veins. He would not be himself without them any longer. But there is a clarity that forms in the midst of it, a slow dawning that allows him to believe that some day this will be bearable. That some day, he will master the indignity of his survival.

In the spring, Thorin gives him leave to ride east with a party; they do not speak of the outposts, the plans for which lie untouched, or of revenge. Thorin has resolved to leave the disputed lands to the Easterlings, for he has no need of them, and by all rights no dwarf of Erebor should set foot in them now. But Fíli does not go as an envoy of his kingdom or even as a soldier; he simply goes.

And he comes to halt at last in the barren field where somewhere, _somewhere_ , his brother's noble ashes lie beneath the earth. He knows full well that they cannot answer, but no knowledge can keep him from calling out across the plain, his voice hoarse on the wind:

"Brother!"

He stands above the bones of dwarves and men alike, and nothing he can do will compel them to share the secrets they guard so jealously. He thinks if only the earth could speak, it has been witness to it all: Kíli's unceremonious slaughter and his slow reduction to ash. And now it hides his brother away from him and looks on, wordless, at his desperation. The silence is an unspeakable injustice.

It is custom that leads him to spill wine for his brother, and grief pours for him a libation of tears, so generous that he thinks he will become a figure of legend: the dwarf who wept until he became a river through the plain, his tributaries twining through the land in his endless quest to find his brother once more. (He would be a cautionary tale, about how dwarves love with all the fire in their hearts for as long as they draw breath.)

But too soon, he has no tears left to give, and his head aches and his eyes burn and his strength is swallowed up inside of him. It would be customary, now, to speak at length and with eloquence to the dead, but his tongue fails him utterly. He has nothing to say to bones and ash, and he has no words worthy of the one who has been taken from him.

"Forever, brother, hail," he says simply, clasping a hand over his heart, where he will hold his brother's memory until the end of his days. It is nothing on the grand funeral orations he should have given back at Erebor, nothing on the many praises he will sing on each anniversary of Kíli's death, but it will have to be enough.

He stands there, at the grave that is not a grave, until the sun sinks beneath the horizon. At last, he steps away to rejoin his party, and there are not words in any language that will suffice for this parting. He can only say _farewell, brother. Here ends our journey._

_I shall not make its like again._


End file.
